AMD Linux Driver Bringing BACO Support To Older Sea Islands / Volcanic Islands GPUs

[Marc Driftmeyer]

They added it for Polaris so that made my morning. I'm holding off on RDNA until the second generation or one that has 16GB of memory, whichever comes first.

[humbug]

Any news on when the amdgpu kernel driver for sea islands will be taken out of experimental status and made default?

[tildearrow]

This hopefully might allow me to turn on my GPU when it randomly shuts down... (or am I wrong)?

[arunbupathy]

I'm actually surprised that this power saving feature wasn't available for Polaris cards till now. This is great news, as every watt of saved power will help me. My Acer Nitro 5 currently only gives about 2.5 hour of battery run time. Thanks to the devs for all their hard work.

[geearf]

This actually is for power savings. See my follow up patch series:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archiv...er/041123.html

Since this is about power savings, how about these 2 bugs:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108379

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108942

?

I have no Windows or ways to measure power drawn only by the GPU so I do not know if it is correct or not, but I still see 30+W idle in amdgpu_pm_info.

[skeevy420]

Any news on when the amdgpu kernel driver for sea islands will be taken out of experimental status and made default?

IMHO, it should be the default for at lease the Bonaire XTX based ones. My old 260x ran great with AMDGPU. Actually, the only time I've used not-AMDGPU since 2016 was on first boot of an install with my 260x.

[humbug]

IMHO, it should be the default for at lease the Bonaire XTX based ones. My old 260x ran great with AMDGPU. Actually, the only time I've used not-AMDGPU since 2016 was on first boot of an install with my 260x.

Same with my R9 290. Less issues with amdgpu. Plus you get vulkan and other newer features.

[gmturner]

Aww, just a few days too late as my trusty old SI card just gave the smoke back on a hot day after many years of driving way more pixels than it was built for. Oh well better late than never!

[boxie]

This actually is for power savings. See my follow up patch series:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archiv...er/041123.html

I vaugley remember reading that window managers need to handle GPU resets and that most currently do not - is this true or is my memory deceiving me?

[agd5f]

I vaugley remember reading that window managers need to handle GPU resets and that most currently do not - is this true or is my memory deceiving me?

The desktop manager needs to handle the reset so that it can re-initialize it's GPU context and buffers since after a GPU reset, the contents of GPU memory are undefined. On windows the desktop manager does this. At the moment, none of the Linux desktop managers do.